1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to electronic musical instruments which are simple and fun to use and more particularly to a voice controlled musical instrument.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Musical instruments have traditionally been difficult to play, thus requiring a significant investment of time and, in some cases money, to learn the basic operating skills of that instrument. In addition to frequent and often arduous practice sessions, music lessons would typically be required, teaching the mechanical skills to achieve the proper musical expression associated with that instrument, such as pitch, loudness, and timbre. In addition, a musical language would be taught so that the user would be able to operate the instrument to play previously written songs.
The evolution of musical instruments has been relatively slow, with few new musical instrument products taking hold over the past several hundred years. The introduction of electronics-related technology, however, has had a significant impact on musical instrument product development. The music synthesizer, for example, together with the piano keyboard interface/controller, has vastly expanded the number and variety of instrument sounds which can be produced by a person who has learned to play a single instrument--that of piano or keyboards. The requirement remained, however, that for someone to operate a synthesizer, that person would have to learn at least some of the fundamentals of music expression associated with playing a piano.
Therefore, for those people who wanted to be able to express themselves musically, but had not learned to play an instrument, or wanted to be able to make many instrument sounds without learning how to play each instrument, there was still a significant time investment required to learn the skill, with no assurance that they could ever reach a level of proficiency acceptable to them.
A variety of methods have been proposed to use the human voice to control a synthesizer, thus taking advantage of the singular musical expression mechanism which most people have virtually anyone who can speak has the ability to change musically expressive parameters such as pitch and loudness. One such method is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,463,650, by Robert Rupert, issued Aug. 7, 1984 incorporated herein by reference. In the Rupert device, real instrumental notes are contained in a memory with the system responsive to the stimuli of, what he refers to as, "mouth music" to create playable musical instruments that will respond to the mouth music stimuli in real time.
The difficulty in practice with using the voice as a controller of a musical synthesizer is that some people have little real or perceived ability to reach pitches in a manner accurate enough to believe they sound good. Even trained vocalists have vocal characteristics such as frequency and interval which are unstable and to some degree inaccurate. Such frequency error or instability goes virtually unnoticed by any one who hears the vocal tone directly. However, the frequency error or instability of the output tone signal can be distinctly perceived by any one when he hears a vocal tone processed by a conventional voice-controlled music synthesizer, as that suggested by Rupert. As a result, there is some segment of the population which may not perceive the voice controlled music synthesizer, alone, as a viable route to personal musical expression and/or entertainment.
One such solution is described in European Pat. No. 142,935, by Ishikawa, Sakata, and Obara, entitled "Voice Recognition Interval Scoring System", dated May 29, 1985. In this patent, Ishikawa et. al., recognize the inaccuracies of the singing voice and "contemplates providing correcting means for easily correcting interval data scored and to correct the interval in a correcting mode by shifting cursors at portions to be corrected". In a similar attempt to deal with the vocal inaccuracies, a device described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,999,456 by Masahiko Tsunoo et al, issued Dec. 28, 1976, utilizes a voice keying system for a voice-controlled musical instrument which limits the output tone to a musical scale. The difficulty in employing either the Ishikawa or the Tsunoo devices for useful purposes is that most untrained musicians will not know which scales are appropriate for different songs and applications. The device may even be a detractor from the unimproved voice-controlled music synthesizer, due to the frustration of the user not being able to reach certain notes he desires to play.
In a related area, the concept of "music-minus-one" is the use of a predefined usually prerecorded musical background to supply contextual music around which a musician/user sings or plays an instrument, usually the lead part. This concept allows the user to make fuller sounding music, by playing a key part, but having the other parts played by other musicians. Benefits to such an experience include greater entertainment value, practice value and an outlet for creative expression.